E-commerce web-sites are becoming increasingly popular with consumers as an efficient, convenient and low cost way to shop for merchandise. In a typical E-commerce web-site, the customer's web browser accesses web pages provided by the web-site's web server. The customer can add merchandise to be purchased to a “shopping cart” by clicking on an icon. The shopping cart is a data structure typically stored on the customer's computer or on the web server. When the customer desires to complete the order, the data structure is forwarded along with a cookie identifying the customer to the web server which processes the order.
Each year hundreds of millions dollars of potential business are lost in E-commerce web-sites due to the failure of a customer to complete an order. Studies have shown that a significant number of shopping carts in E-commerce web-sites are abandoned because the customer is unable to obtain timely or appropriate service from the Internet call center supporting the web-site. In many cases, the customer has questions before he can complete the order which can only be answered by speaking with a working agent at the Internet call center. In other cases, the customer must speak to a working agent at the Internet call center to complete the order.